An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories
Streaming September 6–20, 2021
With works by Martin Arnold, Zoe Beloff, Harun Farocki, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Pierre Huyghe, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Jesse McLean, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Rosalind Nashashibi, Deimantas Narkevičius, Soda Jerk, and Lawrence Weiner
Curated by Lukas Brasiskis
“An other cinema,” a term coined by Raymond Bellour, defines the parallel histories of cinema materializing in contemporary art. Bellour wrote that in today’s art world cinema “finds itself redistributed, transformed, mimicked and reinstalled.” This “other cinema” situates the spectator as “dissolved, fragmented, shaken and intermittent,” inviting us to reconfigure both the spectatorship and the dominant history of film itself. Taking into account ubiquitous practices of reassessment of cinema in modern and contemporary art, this program draws attention to artists’ films and videos that reflect on the history(-ies) of cinema and/or address perceptual and socio-political functions of the cinematic apparatus.
From appropriation of dominant cinematic archives, to critical scrutiny of film techniques, the twelve modern and contemporary artists’ works presented in this program exemplify an alternative and highly self-reflective form of cinema. Following Erika Balsom’s understanding of contemporary art as a potential “laboratory for film, a place in which its social, technological and aesthetic history can be picked over and recycled,” they reconsider what cinema is (or was) and what it can do. With an emphasis on the ideology behind the operation of filmic apparatus and the technological externalization of memory and time, the works in this program expose critical and aesthetic potentials of “an other cinema,” oscillating between white cube and black box.
The program is organized in conjuction with the online symposium The State of the Moving Image, livestreaming September 17–19, 2021 on e-flux Video & Film.